Business owners and their employees have traditionally provided their contact information with potential customers, and other business representatives, through the exchange of physical printed business cards. In addition, business owners and their employees often desire to send contact information to a recipient via an electronic communication method, such as electronic mail, short message service (SMS), HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or social media posting.
However, potential customers, or business representatives may give and or receive too many printed or e-mailed business cards over the course of a given time period. Many card recipients may attempt to organize these cards in a physical rolodex, or store them electronically on various computer mediums, including mobile smartphones. Electronic storage of these cards may be tedious as it requires entry of the card data by hand, or scanning each card individually into an electronic business card contacts program. The contact information may be entered or scanned incorrectly into the contact program.
A recipient may also lose electronic business cards due to loss, malfunction, or replacement of the recipient's mobile device. A recipient may need a backup of the electronic business cards of the recipient's personal and business contacts to retrieve the electronic business cards back on the mobile device of the user.
Furthermore, physical or electronic storage of business card contact information does not provide the recipient with automated means for updating the card contact information with new or updated information.
In addition, business owners and their employees often do not have methods of tracking, or approving whom a card recipient may forward their contact information too. A card recipient may forward the contact information to multiple secondary contacts that may forward the contact information to multiple tertiary contacts, and so on. Tracking of this information may provide valuable business or networking leads.
Approving each business card exchange to secondary, or tertiary recipients, may also prevent problems with privacy and/or unwanted contact. For example, unapproved contact details from a business card for a prominent individual may allow others to harass the individual. Uncontrolled business cards may also be used to send spam communications and/or make unsolicited contact. In addition, personal and/or contact details from an electronic business card may be used to commit identity theft or other types of fraud.
Finally, with the explosion of social media, many businesses have too much valuable contact and networking information that can be adequately stored on one card. Contact information on these cards is no longer limited to a name, email address, mailing address, title, organization, phone number, and website. Contact information may also include, but is not limited to: website profile pages, marketing websites, LinkedIn® webpages, Twitter® usernames, and Facebook® webpages. This on-line social media contact information may be cumbersome for recipients to enter manually into a contacts system.
Accordingly, the subject invention provides an electronic interactive business card system for mobile devices that provides electronic cards that contain direct contact links for the card owner's phone numbers, addresses, websites, and social media webpages. These cards can only be exchanged with approval of the original card owner. There is also a need for the system for storing the electronic business cards of the recipient's business contacts on a central server as a backup means. All of this information is automatically updated within the system to keep the card recipient completely updated on all their card contact information.